Mix it up with the very useful RSS Mix tool

Have you ever wished you could just have one RSS feed that had information from a number of different sites? You could have a single feed with everything you want concerning a particular subject or idea no matter what or how many sites the information comes from. One service out there called RSS Mix does just that.

For example, consider LIVEdigitally’s three feeds (entries, comments, Flickr). Enter each feed in RSS Mix’s simple text box and hit Create! What you get in return is a new feed that combines all of the information from all of the feeds. Here is the single feed created with RSS Mix for all of our feeds here.

Besides combining multiple feeds from one site, you could also combine feeds from multiple sites on a particular topic. Maybe you’re freakishly obsessed with something obscure like meerkats (I’m not, it was just a random thought). You could setup a feed from Google News concerning meerkats with one from Powell’s Books to keep track of new books on meerkats. Toss them together at RSS Mix and you have a handy little meerkat feed.

Give this tool a shot. If you have tons of feeds this can really make your life more simple.

Not familiar with RSS? Read on…

It stands for Really Simple Syndication and there are a few different versions and a ton of synonyms (check out the Wikipedia article if you want all the details). Basically though, it’s a way to be easily informed of new information from a website, blog, wiki, etc.

Just about every major (and minor) site on the Internet has an RSS “feed”. LIVEdigitally has a few of them – one for all of the entries on the site, one for all of the comments left on the site, and one for all of the Flickr photos (this feed is actually provided by Flickr with your account).

There are lots of web-based and stand-alone applications that read RSS feeds. Some of them include PageFlakes, NetVibes, Google Reader, FeedReader, SharpReader… I could go on. Just do a quick Google search for more.